The latest news, tips, and whatever else we feel like.

From the developers desk this week.
Friday, November 24, 2006

Thanksgiving week has never been known as a "productive" week... However, our team was working like crazy before the Tryptophan kicked in and everyone slipped into a Thanksgiving Day food coma.

New Feature Added - Audio Only Streaming

Several of you have been asking about audio only streaming. We now fully support audio only streaming using two different methods. The first method requires no real work on your part. Simply create a console and set the console type to "Single Audio Stream". Select the stream by title as before. When you send someone to the new console, it will separate the audio from the video, and only send the video to them.We have also added full indexing support for flv files with no video track. Encode your audio-only track with your favorite FLV encoder and upload it. (Our favorite is MediaCoder.) The indexing system will detect your track is audio only and act appropriately.

As you have come to expect with Light Cast MediaSTREAM, streamLOCK is available. You can see what part of the file someone is listening to on the live viewers screen and the server sends the stream based on timecode, saving bandwidth.

From the developers desk this week
Friday, November 10, 2006

This week we focused on adding features to the console and squashing some newly discovered bugs. We are getting close to offering a video library system in the console management system. Stay tuned for more information on this. We also rolled out two new integration features. 1) Mark a video public and link it into your console. 2) Data-only integration.

Bug Fixes

We added a workaround for a bug in some VP6 encoding solutions. This wasn't really our bug, but we do everything we can to make the service run smoothly for our customers.

Video profiling. There was a bug in our profiling system causing it to not store the profiling information if the sample rate of the audio track was about 32khz. These videos would play in fail safe mode, but the initial size of the video area would be incorrect.

Admin

The stream details page that you see after uploading a video is now available at any time by clicking the video name in the video manager. We will continue to add new features to this.

Live video

We continue to make progress on our live video solution. It should be available to our regular customers in Q1 2007.

From the developers desk this week
Thursday, October 26, 2006

This week most of the Light Cast Media developers were working on the Content Distribution Network. Uptime is important to us, because we know it is important to you!

Content Distribution and System MonitoringThis week we finalized core CDN code to monitor where the media files are routed. Example: You are a customer located in Atlanta. You log in and upload your files to the LCM network. Our system will know where you are, and route your files to our Atlanta data-center. Also this week, we improved our Edge caching system. Example: Your media is being watched by someone in California, and you are located in Florida. Our system knows that it is coming from California, and copies your file into cache to our Edge Server in our San Jose, CA data-center. We made the updates this week to give us a lot of flexibility as we scale out and to ensure high uptime and unmatchable quality.

Live Streaming As much as I hesitate to publish this, here we go. This week we ran another test of our live streaming solution. We are working with one of our large churches and original "alpha" clients to tweak and hone in on an amazing live streaming solution for you. The initial testing is going great, and we have a nice solution mapped out. As it stands today, we look to roll out Live Streaming Q1 of 2007.

Stay tuned... Next week we plan on announcing a huge new piece of functionality. Yes, I did say huge!

From the developers desk this week
Friday, October 20, 2006

This week was a very productive week for the Light Cast Media developers. The goal of this weekly blog post is to bring you all up to speed on all the additions and changes to the Light Cast Media system.

Auto Player Positioning/SizingWhen a video is uploaded, the server automatically detects the uploaded video size. Now the player will always start out at the actual video size, which should mean no resizing, and fast video start times.

New Video ControlsTwo new video players were launched this week. First, a "Thin-White" video player and and additional "No-Controls" player. You might be asking yourself, why a No-Controls player? Simple, we had a customer who requested it, so we added it.

Bug fixWe noticed that there was a minor bug where 10px were being cut off vertically from all videos. We would be shocked if you guys ever noticed this. However, it is important to us to strive for excellence, so we fixed it this week.

2) Added some great new reporting features in the "basic" reporting section. Now you can sort by multiple options, view stream requests, and see where your videos are being viewed by country, and more granular.

3) Deployed "Live" active stream reporting. With Active Stream Reporting you can view all your videos being streamed throughout the world. It shows you what server it is streaming from, what location it is being streamed to, where the viewer started in the video, where they are currently in the video, as well as how long they have been watching.

4) Intelligent video display. Let me remind you that Light Cast Media's desires to make your life simpler when it comes to streaming media. A simple way we do that is by you not having to think! Intelligent video display simply delivers the best video possible to your viewers based on their connection speed. In other words, if you have 1 video, with 5 different quality settings we will serve up the best quality possible every-time without you doing a thing! Streaming made simple.

Advanced Reporting Image
Friday, September 22, 2006

Hey, have you noticed that the Advanced Reporting page is missing an image? I bet you have, we receive a lot of emails about it.

So why is it missing? Simple, we need your input as a customer. To many times software companies built out functionality that they "think" customers want. Not here brotha, we build out tools and technology that you need! Take a moment and tell us what is important to you in your advanced reports and we will build it to your liking! That is just the kind of company that we strive to be.